All clocks seem well set around here. The summer has officially left us for this year.
For its farewell event, everything is showered with celebration confetti: Pure drops of rain that borrow the colors of nature, always-welcomed sun rays lazily lingering around, casting cheerfulness on the leaves that announce the tone of the coming season.
And I'm looking ahead...
A plane. My second for that day had just set off. From my window seat, I saw beautiful Amsterdam. A river, lakes, green areas and well structured building blocks… then the huge open ocean. The water was seemingly calm, but intimidating. A whole world of mysteries and endless untold stories lying beneath that glittering blue surface, whose uniformity was disturbed by a few dark dots scattered here and there.
That day, I experienced the longest sunset of my life. It literally lasted for hours. My flight which set off at sunset was traveling west, and so was the end of the day. As the arrival of nighttime slowly worked its way westward above the Atlantic, so did our flight. As if we were earning bonus hours on that day. As if the deepest wish of permanently busy people had just materialized. The day lingered beyond the twenty-four hours.
Layers and layers of comfy-looking clouds appeared outside my window. Amazing nuances of pink and purple marked the horizon, an imaginary yet universally referential line somewhere in the air.
From my thousands-of-meters altitude, I thought of how drastically perspective differences can change the way we see things. Just as the usually remote clouds looked fluffy and almost inviting when seen from above. Just like heavy, colossal, roaring ships can turn into mere dark dots scattered here and there on the surface of a blue ocean.
Yup, I made it!! My Integrated Campaigns class was cancelled on Thursday so that we all manage to attend Obama’s speech at MSU’s Adams Field. The event was huge and thousands of people started lining up as early as 8:30 am, while the speech was due to start at 2:30 pm!!
Because of an earlier class and a workshop, I joined the line at 1:30 pm… and reached the gate half an hour later… and I, it goes without saying, was not the last one in line. Just a few minutes after I joined, hundreds were behind me.
After security check, I and my friends from Kazakhstan and Taiwan entered the field, and got that feeling of being lost in an ocean of people. Later I read in the newspaper that the number of students and local residents who gathered there was estimated at 20,000! So this explains why all we could see when we got there was… the backs of the people in front of us… and the heads of those in front of them at the best of cases.
Honestly we played unfair a little bit and started sneaking a few meters ahead… as long as people were not reacting negatively, we kept moving ahead: D After losing our Taiwanese friend in the crowd, I and the Kazakh student reached a place from where we still could see only backs and heads… but where my beloved camera, when lifted very high and zoomed, could catch the speaker’s place :D So when Obama was finally on stage, we spend most of the time watching him on the screen of my camera :D:D:D
I cannot tell you how loud and passionate the crowd was when Obama showed on stage. You would think that all MSU and the surrounding area are only made up of Democrats. But that’s not a hundred percent true. There must be people who came there just out of curiosity, others who, like me and my friends, can’t even vote but came to be part of the event, and those who are in fact Republicans, and were there to know what McCain’s opponent had to say. Talking about these, it was fun to see that at the entry of the field, some McCain supporters had lined up lifting signs supporting their candidate... although, ironically, McCain’s campaign officials declared late Thursday that he has given up on Michigan State!!
Now what was the speech about? It was mainly about economy. This issue addressed the residents’ main concern given the current economic crisis in the US and the whole world, and more than that, given that Michigan is one of the states that cannot boast a strong economy. (This state has the highest unemployment rate in the US: 8.9%).
Obama also presented some broad lines of his agenda: Fixing the deficient health care system, creating new jobs, developing the quality of education, AND a point which perfectly matches the spirit of our green university: investing millions of dollars to develop sustainable energy (wind, solar…) AND … ladies and gentlemen: end the US dependence on foreign oil. Even if these two last points were the only things Obama would achieve during his mandate, I would pray day and night for him to be president of the USA, because this would avoid a lot of calamities around the world.
Anyway, I don’t know what would be the impression I get if I attended a similar speech given by McCain. (Hmmmm although I’ve got an idea about that when I watched his September 26 debate with Obama…). But what I can say for sure is that Obama is definitely a good speaker… and seems to be a serious, hardworking person… that is if enough Americans trust him next November and give him the chance to prove it!
With these pictures I took last weekend, I am starting a new set of posts labelled “Clicks & Pics”. The pictures I will post won’t always be high-quality (what would you expect from an amateur photographer using an ordinary digital camera? :p). But blogging is about sharing, and I would like to share with you one of the things I love.
